Name: "I took the lake between my legs": Women of a Certain Age Read Poems on Sex and Death
Start: 2026-10-09T18:00:00-0700
End: 2026-10-09T20:00:00-0700

"I took the lake between my legs": Women of a Certain Age Read Poems on Sex and Death

Friday October 9, 2026 6:00pm - 8:00pm PDT

Vintage Berkeley Wine Shop

Buy Tickets/RSVP

$12 adv / $15 door

Co-presented with Left Margin Lit and Vintage Berkeley

Back by popular demand, with an all-new lineup! Sex and death are central human concerns, but older women poets often find themselves silenced or sidelined on the first of these subjects. Here, in an event curated by Rebecca Foust, five women aged 40 and better—Mahogany L. Browne, Prageeta Sharma, Jen Siraganian, Melissa Stein, and Barbara Jane Reyes—will share frankly erotic work that refuses to be muted or mooted and makes a bulwark of bodily sensuality against death, time, and our aging selves. Alongside the reading, emceed by poet Tracey Knapp, winemaker Emily Fernwood will be on site to introduce Osa Major wines, which will be available for purchase by the glass. This event will take place on Vintage Berkeley’s secret garden patio—dress accordingly! Doors at 5:30pm.

Moderators

Tracey Knapp

Tracey Knapp's second collection, Swerve, was released from Pine Row Press in Spring 2026. Her first full-length collection of poems, Mouth, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award and was published in 2015. Tracey has received awards and scholarships from La Romita School of Art in... Read More →

Speakers

Emily Fernwood

Osa Major Wines

Emily Fernwood is a Berkeley-based winemaker devoted to crafting classic, site-driven wines under Osa Major Wines. Working with organically farmed vineyards across California, her approach emphasizes native fermentations, gentle handling, and little to no added sulfur, allowing the grapes an... Read More →

Jen Siraganian

Jen Siraganian is an Armenian-American writer and former Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California. Her debut collection, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead, which won the 2026 Perugia Press Prize, was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize and The Journal’s Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, and a semi-finalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and Vassar Miller Prize. Her poems have won... Read More →

Melissa Stein

Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collections Terrible blooms (Copper Canyon Press) and Rough Honey, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, Best New Poets, and others, and she’s received awards and fellowships from the NEA, Pushcart Prize, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She is a freelance editor in the Bay Area... Read More →

Mahogany L. Browne

Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, playwright, organizer, and educator is the inaugural poet in residence at Lincoln Center, a 2022 Kennedy Center Next 50 Fellow, the inaugural Distinguished Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University, a MacDowell Arts Advocacy Awardee, a NAACP Image Award nominess and... Read More →

Prageeta Sharma

Prageeta Sharma is the author of six collections of poetry; her most recent collection is Onement Won, out from Wave Books. She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Race, Creative Writing, and Artistic and Aesthetic Practices, a recent recipient of the 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and is currently the Henry G. Lee... Read More →

Rebecca Foust

Rebecca Foust’s books include You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems (Blue Light Press 2026) and Only (Four Way Books 2022). Her poems appear widely in venues including The Slowdown, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, POETRY, and Southern Review, winning the James Dickey, New Ohio Review, Pablo Neruda, James Hearst, and Poetry International prizes in recent years... Read More →

Barbara Jane Reyes

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Poeta en San Francisco, Diwata, Invocation to Daughters, Letters to a Young Brown Girl, and others. Her eighth book, Daughtersong Diaspore, is forthcoming in 2027.

Friday October 9, 2026 6:00pm - 8:00pm PDT
Vintage Berkeley Wine Shop 2113 Vine St, Berkeley, CA 94709

Poetry

Age Limit 21+
City Berkeley

Litquake 2026